Comparing weapons

6L6 wrote:An example I would use, Merlin droped a 500 lb bomb on the ship that Thirsks family was on, it seems to me that in 400 years a 1 lb bomb should do the same job. evilauthor reread my post, you will see that I was talking about bridging the gap between chemical and nuclear wepons.

n7axw wrote:[
One of the reasons for that 500 pound bomb was that it wasn't up to TF tech. The thought was that by equiping the skimmer to use more primitive tech, one could avoid the attention of the OBS.

Don

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6L6 wrote:An example I would use, Merlin droped a 500 lb bomb on the ship that Thirsks family was on, it seems to me that in 400 years a 1 lb bomb should do the same job. evilauthor reread my post, you will see that I was talking about bridging the gap between chemical and nuclear wepons.

Expert snuggler wrote:We don't know whether the OBS could detect duodecylplylatomate or other technically exotic explosives. It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near one. Old-style chemical high explosives are good enough for the next few years of warfare at least.

That said I can imagine some profitable covert ops that could be done with hafnium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy).

isaac_newton wrote:

Expert snuggler wrote:We don't know whether the OBS could detect duodecylplylatomate or other technically exotic explosives. It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near one. Old-style chemical high explosives are good enough for the next few years of warfare at least.

That said I can imagine some profitable covert ops that could be done with hafnium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy).

'Duodec' eh - now there's a blast from the past

USMA74 wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:quote="Expert snuggler"We don't know whether the OBS could detect duodecylplylatomate or other technically exotic explosives. It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near one. Old-style chemical high explosives are good enough for the next few years of warfare at least.

That said I can imagine some profitable covert ops that could be done with hafnium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy)./quote

'Duodec' eh - now there's a blast from the past

I wonder if those young whippersnappers playing on my lawn and posting here have even read Doc E.E. Smith's Lensman Series to understand the reference.

6L6 wrote:An example I would use, Merlin droped a 500 lb bomb on the ship that Thirsks family was on, it seems to me that in 400 years a 1 lb bomb should do the same job. evilauthor reread my post, you will see that I was talking about bridging the gap between chemical and nuclear wepons.

Jonathan_S wrote:I don't have the text in front of me. Did it say the bomb literally weight 500 lbs (or even that the explosive filler weighed 500 lbs)?

It's possible that by the 24th century the "megatons" style designation had worked it's way down to conventional explosives - so unless you're talking about carry weight explosives are talked about in terms of their equivalent tons (or pounds) of TNT.
But that's just off the cuff speculation on my part and might be flat out contradicted by the actual text...

Sept. YOG 897 .VIII. wrote:Merlin Athrawes had learned a bitter lesson in helplessness when Sir Gwyllym Manthyr’s men were consigned to the Punishment. He’d been unable to sink the ships on which they were transported for the over-water portion of the trip, unable to give them the far more merciful death of drowning. There’d been several reasons for that, but one of them had been the very high probability that the emissions of his skimmer’s normal energy weapons would have been detected by the sensors serving the orbital bombardment platform. There’d been no way to predict how the bombardment system might have reacted to that, and so he’d been powerless to intervene. But he’d also been determined that would never happen again, and so the remotes in Nimue’s Cave had built the skimmer an anachronistic nose gun—a multi-barreled auto-cannon—to replace its original internal weapons. And to go with it, those same remotes had produced a small stock of ancient, laser-guided bombs. They were loaded only with old-fashioned chemical explosives, but Owl had built them in several sizes . . . including a two-thousand-pound version filled with half a ton of explosives far better than anything Sahndrah Lywys had ever produced. 

In this instance, however, a rather smaller weapon would do.


Stefyny and Hailyn, and every member of their families, whirled back to the north as the five-hundred-pound bomb punched through Saint Frydhelm’s decks as if they’d been made of paper. It detonated squarely in the galleon’s magazine, surrounded by fifteen tons of gunpowder, and a pillar of fire raged into the heavens.